Pending Evolution of Grammars

Publication

Publication

Presented at the
Extreme Modeling Workshop, Indianapolis

The classic approach to grammar manipulation is based on instant processing of grammar edits, which limits the kinds of grammar evolution scenarios that can be expressed with it. Treating transformation preconditions as guards poses limitations on concurrent changes of the same grammar, on reuse of evolution scripts, on expressing optionally executed steps, on batch processing and optimization of them, etc. We propose an alternative paradigm of evolution, where a transformation can be scheduled for later execution based on its precondition. This kind of extreme evolution can be useful for expressing scenarios that are impossible to fully automate within the classic or the negotiated transformation paradigms.